I’m not sure how many of us in tech are hunting werewolves, witches, or monsters, but there are A LOT of us looking for silver bullets. Take one look around at the world of software development and operations today and it’s baffling. A perfect example of what I’m talking about can be found in this CircleCI blog post, which sounds like nonsense but actually sums up the current state of software development and operations quite nicely. Maybe we’re not looking for silver bullets. Maybe we’re looking for the gold bullet, then the platinum bullet, then we move onto missiles, bombs, etc. It never ends.

I’m not talking about the evolution of technology as a whole. We have a desire to always learn and progress. What we have in software development and operations today is a hyper spin cycle of the next shiny object. Very little of it gets mature enough before it’s thrown out in favor of the new-new silver bullet. Unlike the last silver bullet, this one will kill werewolves AND witches. If you’re a software engineer caught up in this never ending hype you can find yourself using all the latest and hottest tech with so much complexity it will melt the minds of mere mortals. This happens rather easily because the hottest tech often comes from companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. who are solving extremely large and complex problems. They are generously (and often strategically) open sourcing a lot of that work, which turns into the hottest tech of the month club. But most of us are not solving problems at that scale. When we take their tech and apply it to our problem we can easily find ourselves with a lot of moving parts when only a few would likely suffice for our problems. Multiply this problem by the output of the firehose of “innovation” happening. I put innovation in quotes because what comes to us in the guise of innovation is often a company’s hope to ever so slightly improve upon a good enough solution and take away market share in the process. Even when there is legit innovation, the benefits of adopting a brand new stack or even layer in the stack are questionable when weighed against building upon a solid foundation.

Again, to get the best grasp of what I’m referring to, read the CircleCI blog post. It’s short, funny, and maddening all at once. We need to stop the never ending pursuit of the silver bullet and figure out a more sustainable way to build great services people find value in. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’re spending too much of our time porting or, worse, figuring out how to port existing stuff that works well onto something that is now deemed “better”.